Reflecting on “What’s Religion? What’s a Cult?”
Also I definitely missed a reading last time (COVID-brain FTW)
I’m still making my way through all of your excellent responses, so I expect I’ll have some things to add to this post once I’m caught up. A few observations, a quick overview of constitutional protections for religion, and two big issues I want to highlight before we move into the semester proper.
On responding to lectures
A few guidelines on responding to posts:
refer to the readings/podcasts/videos
You want to demonstrate that you’ve read and understood not only the post, but the materials we’re reading for each topic. The best responses will reference the assigned sources, preferably paraphrasing them in your own words.
avoid rhetorical questions
It’s great to raise points, but don’t leave them hanging. If you’re asking a question, you also need to answer it.
don’t shout into the void
This is the closest thing we get to a class discussion this semester. It’s great to offer your own analysis, but try to engage your classmates’ interpretations as well.
On your responses to “What’s Religion? What’s a cult?”
Again, I haven’t read everyone’s yet, but so many of you are raising really important points! I want to highlight a few issues raised by the responses I have had a chance to read so far:
christianity is complicated
If you’re less familiar with religious studies, I’m going to strongly recommend that you listen to the intro episode of Keeping It 101 so that you can familiarize yourself with some of the basic assumptions of the discipline.
Perhaps the most basic is this: no religious tradition is a monolith.
It’s important that we start from complexity. Yes, Christianity has justified some of the most horrific acts of white supremacist violence this country has ever seen. But Christianity — or rather Christians — have also used their religious commitments and communities to dismantle and reject white supremacy. Like we keep saying, religion is messy because people are messy. Avoid broad generalizations and stereotypes.
don’t leave whiteness unnamed
Especially in a class about race and religion, but this goes for situations beyond this class as well as for our discussions. If what you’re trying to critique is the way white Americans have historically used Christianity to perpetuate white supremacy, say that. No religion is a monolith, and Christians of color have been at the forefront of antiracist activism for centuries.
brainwashing is not a thing
One of the most common misconceptions about people who join new religious movements is that they are tricked or forced or brainwashed into joining. This is simply not true.
As we discuss on the “Cults” episode, peer pressure and intense socialization can absolutely influence folks to make choices that seem strange or illogical to outsiders. But the people making those unconventional choices still have agency. It’s important that we not dismiss their ability to act, even as we recognize that intense socialization, isolation, and peer pressure can complicate agency, too.
I wrote more about this in my response last week.
On disestablishment and free exercise
Hopefully you listened to the “Who gets left out of religion?” episode of Keeping It 101, so this might sound familiar. But just in case, I want to be sure that we have two important concepts in our theoretical toolkit for analyzing 20th century religious discrimination in what’s now the United States.
“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.”
- U.S. Constitution, First Amendment
The US Constitution provides three explicit protections for religion. Article VI Paragraph III of the Constitution proper guarantees that no one has to take a religious test to hold government office or receive governmental protections. (Thanks, Moses Seixas!) The other two explicit protections are found in the First Amendment.
disestablishment
The first clause of the First Amendment guarantees that the federal government cannot favor one religious tradition over others (that is, it cannot establish a national religion).
In theory, this is great. In practice, the US sucks at disestablishment. The podcast gets into more detail here, but the Satanic Temple primarily focuses its efforts on calling out state governments and institutions — like public schools — for affording rights and privileges to (primarily white) Christians that they do not afford to members and groups of minority religions.
free exercise
The second clause of the First Amendment forbids the federal government (and by virtue of the 14th Amendment, the states) from interfering with the “free exercise” of religion. Which also sounds great, except that the Founders didn’t actually define free exercise.
Free exercise sounds like practice, right? It sounds like you should be able to practice your religion however you want. But that’s not how this clause has been interpreted — and we get our first definition for free exercise in the context of a group often referred to as a “cult:” the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS, or the Mormons).
In the 19th century, Mormon theology permitted polygyny, or the marriage of one man to multiple women. The US government, as we’ll discuss later in the semester, was decidedly not okay with this practice, even though Mormons are Christian and there’s a biblical precedent for polygyny. In Reynolds v. US (1878), the Supreme Court ruled that while religious people can believe whatever they like, they have to practice in accordance with the law of the land.
With some exceptions, SCOTUS has primarily continued to define religion in terms of belief rather than practice, and the practices it has protected overwhelmingly approximate those of white mainstream Christians.
This is going to matter a LOT for whose practices are and aren’t targeted for surveillance, harassment, and condemnation (as we’ll see for the rest of the semester).
